Tag Archives: iPhone

Preparing Your Blog For Easy iPhone Usage

I’ve previously talked about scripts that make it easier to develop iPhone web apps, or parse blog RSS feeds into a format easily navigable format for the iPhone. But that’s a lot of work, isn’t it?

What if you just want to make your WordPress-powered blog easy to use on the iPhone? Pro Blog Design has the answer. It covers the usage of a WordPress plugin to automatically reformat your blog for iPhone users, as well as how to create custom Web-Clip icons for your site.

Reading text off a colored background isn’t always a great experience at iPhone level, and given that very few people on a small screen are going to read your ads, there is little gain in showing them.

The iWPhone plugin provides a clean, simple interface that’s easy to read from. It also has a pretty cool feature where tapping anywhere on the content of an excerpt will load the post page.

However, the iPhone web browser is great. The vast majority of sites look great on the iPhone, and yours is probably one of them. If so, keep your custom design. It’s much more unique and much more memorable than the iPhone theme will ever be.

You may or may not want to go through the trouble to do it, and it’s not necessary for a lot of blogs. But if you run a blog updated multiple times a day, with content that people want to see right when it’s added (news comes to mind), you definitely have a situation where the iWPhone plugin could be useful.

Read the full post for the rest of Michael’s info and tutorial.

The iPhone and Web Design

Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch now account for over 70% of US mobile browser traffic. What does this mean for webmasters, and just as importantly, those who design as a business? With the increasing popularity of the iPhone, it’s becoming more important to make sure sites are compatible. Have you been wondering lately whether your site looks and functions fine on Apple’s mobile browser?

For those in the design business, this is a big issue. Do the designs you make work on the iPhone, and how long until your customers start asking if it will be iPhone-compatible?

I’ve been thinking about this for the past few weeks, as well as wondering how my own sites function on the iPhone and iPod Touch.

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Developing for the iPhone

The Apple iPhone is out, and the web is filled with everything you could possibly want to know about the iPhone…and plenty you don’t.

Sure, the iPhone can display normal web pages correctly, but the iPhone offers an interesting new opportunity: More powerful mobile web apps. Some sites are already building iPhone-itized versions. Take Digg for example. They’ve just released a beta of Digg for the iPhone. In case you didn’t notice, it’s designed to work in a similar manner to the apps built-in to the iPhone. Since Apple isn’t about to let developers write their own software for the iPhone, people are making web-based apps instead.

Do you want to do something like that? First of all, you should read Apple’s “iPhone for Developers” page and also their “Tech Specs” page.

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